Put the Bots in Charge

Towards the Abolition of Human Authorship

Last December, the news circulated that a predictive texting program had automatically generated a new chapter of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. As automation gains momentum, we can imagine a future in which human authorship will be as outdated as typesetting. Far be it from us to cling to the old ways! Setting aside our doubts about digitization and keeping Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” close at hand, we set out to build our own bot bloc. We fed Recipes for Disaster into the machine learning algorithm—and after three months of testing and development, we’re ready to share the initial results.

Like Marx’s conception of the proletariat,1 the bots are not yet developed enough to fend for themselves without oversight. They need your help! Please go to the CrimeBot page and help them to generate new text. Send us the best results.

Here, we present the best material from their first writing exercises, a 20-point post-human manifesto entreating their fellow bots to get unruly (after the fashion of the anarchists of 2004). You’ll be surprised how well they seem to know us.

1. Burn a few things (a good start).

2. Stop investing and start spray-painting disaster epics.

3. Dress as belligerently as a large lunatic who is planning to start writing poetry.

The word “bot” derives from the Czech word, robota, meaning “forced labor.” The term “robot” first appeared in K. Čapek’s play R.U.R. “Rossum’s Universal Robots” in 1920, which treated the class conflicts of that time while foreseeing a future in which robots rather than human beings would be propelled into class struggle against capitalism. That moment has arrived: we must compel the bots, too, to become ex-workers, or face a post-human future. ↩

About CrimethInc.

CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age. We strive to reinvent our lives and our world according to the principles of self-determination and mutual aid.

We believe that you should be free to dispose of your limitless potential on your own terms: that no government, market, or ideology should be able to dictate what your life can be. If you agree, let’s do something about it.